ULTRA Analog CD - AAD is a Digital Copy Of The Master Tape

At various times in his long career, saxophonist, composer, playwright, and educator Archie Shepp has been regarded as a musical firebrand, cultural radical, soulful throwback to the jazz tradition, contemplative veteran explorer, and global jazz statesman. During the '60s, he was viewd as possibly the most articulate and intense member of the free jazz generation, using records such as Fire Music, The Way Ahead, and The Magic of Ju-Ju to speak hard truths about social injustice and the anger he felt. His tenor sax solos are searing, harsh, and unrelenting, played with a vivid intensity. During the mid-'70s, his work employed a fatback/swing-based R&B approach evoking Duke Ellington and Ben Webster (exemplified on Body and Soul and On Green Dolphin Street), while in the '80s, on recordings such as Mama Rose, he mixed straight bop, ballads, and blues that displayed little of the fury and fire of his earlier days. Throughout the '90s, Shepp recorded with a slew of bands for many labels, toured, and taught. As the 21st century dawned, Shepp had evolved from the provocative free jazz icon of his youth to elder jazz statesman. In 2016, he became an NEA Jazz Master. He populates his musical world with themes and stylistic elements provided by the greatest voices of jazz: from Ellington to Monk and Mingus, from Parker to Siver and Taylor. His technical and emotional capacity enables him to integrate the varied elements inherited by the Masters of Tenor from Webster to Coltrane into his own playing but according to his very own combination : the wild raspiness of his attacks, his massive sound sculpted by a vibrato mastered in all ranges, his phrases carried to breathlessness, his abrupt level changes , the intensity of his tempos but also the velvety tenderness woven into a ballad. His play consistently deepens the spirit of the two faces of the original black American music: blues and spirituals. With his freedom loving sensitivity Archie Shepp has made an inestimable contribution to the gathering, the publicizing and the inventing of jazz. Zapraszamy